The present disclosure relates to monitoring of applications and systems in a production environment, and more specifically, to monitoring applications with a monitoring tool.
Monitoring of the performance of applications and systems by remote administrators is a typical task performed in the normal course of an operation of these systems. To monitor the application, the administrator interacts with a monitoring tool to perform a series of tests on the application to determine if the application is responding or performing in the manner expected. These tests are often the same tests that were run or created during the development and testing of the application being monitored. Often times the monitoring tool is further configured to monitor a number of different applications at the same time. Each of these different applications was created and tested using different testing tools and execution engines within the testing tool to execute or run the particular test on the application while the application was in development.
In order for the monitoring tool to be able to run these same tests against the application in the production environment the monitoring tool needs to have the same execution engine as the corresponding testing tool. For a monitoring tool that monitors multiple different applications this results in the monitoring tool having a corresponding number of execution engines within it. This causes the monitoring tool to be coupled to each of the particular testing tools and more particularly the particular version of the testing tool.
When the developer of the application updates the application often times the testing tool is updated with new tests and many times the corresponding execution engine is also updated. From the developers point of view these updates are seamless and do not create problems in the execution of the tests. However, for users of the monitoring tools these updates can result in the monitoring tool not being able to execute particular tests against the application as the execution engine on the monitoring tool is out of date. While the administrator can update the monitoring tool to obtain the new execution engine, often times for a variety of reasons they do not update the tool. Also because the application (or instances thereof) is often monitored by a number of monitoring tools across different organizations, the developer of the application cannot be sure that all of the tools have the most up-to date versions.